The Least Populated Spot on the Planet

Demographers bring the entire arsenal of data-gathering tools to their profession, going about the important work of understanding how densely this or that city, county, or region is populated.

This has important implications for city planning, utility demand forecasting, political boundary-setting, and the matter of choosing where exactly to locate new businesses.

They must as well take into account where exactly it is that the world is least populated, where our species is most scattered, where the surrounding countryside is divided among the fewest inhabitants, where the space between one human and the next is the furthest.

It has got to be a matter of discussion over beer and chips when these professionals get together of an evening. Every line of endeavor has its lore and legends, demography cannot be so different.

We can picture several of these fine people seated in a smoky room after a long day of examining satellite-bases aerial photography, perhaps seasoning the day with simple finger-counting here on the ground.

The conversation roams freely, as it does among professionals after a long day or week.

This one up-and-comer, steeped in the latest in data analysis, says, “the way I look at it, the least populated region in the world are the Russia Steppes, you can go miles and miles in that wilderness and never find evidence of human habitation.”

He sits back satisfied, certain that he has made his point. Well, he’s that way, he’s always doing this sitting back satisfied thing.

This woman over on the other side of the table orders a reuben from a passing waitress, and scoffs gently. “That is the kind of thing that would occur to a relative newcomer to the field, kid. The wastelands of Antarctica are usually regarded as the least occupied region of the earth.”

Well, and then these others chime in and push forward their candidates for the sparsest scattering of homo sapiens known to science: the furthest reaches of the Amazonian jungle; the very epicenter of the Sahara Desert; the vast barren plains atop the high plateaus of South America.

One man though has remained quiet throughout the discussion.

He has the look of a grizzled veteran, a man who has seen it all, a man who has absorbed a lot of life and taken in a lot of hard questions, and has mused over them many a night sitting quietly by himself.

“You are all wrong,” he says flatly, and such is his reputation in the field that they immediately go quiet and every head turns towards him. They don’t want to miss this.

“You have named entirely commonplace regions of relatively light population density.” He pauses as if thinking of something hard and unyielding. “These are the ideas of children.” He leans back. “No, I know of a place that makes these others seem crowded. A place where it appears that mankind has never come and if it has come, has never stayed.”

He shivers slightly.

“It puts a chill in me, it does,” he says, as if remembering some long ago horror.

The others hang on the edge of their seats. “Well, tell us, Old-Timer, what then is the least populated spot of land on the earth?”

“That, my friends,” and there seems to be a catch in his throat, “that is the viewing stands at your average high school track meet.”

And then the others saw what he in his wisdom saw.

For they too had observed these track meets, in passing to be sure, but they knew they existed, and judging from memory there were so few people in the stands that statistically you could round it down to zero and be perfectly within your rights.

It was right before their eyes!

On those occasions when the photo satellite zoomed overhead, clicking away, passing high over a high school stadium during a track meet, it had seemed strange, passing strange, that never was any data revealed there from the ground.

It was like trying to gather population data from the surface of the moon.

They had put it down at the time to equipment malfunction, but they see now that no images of people came back precisely because there were no people down there to see.

“I’ve done the calculations,” says the Old-Timer, staring meditatively into his sarsaparilla. “If you extrapolated the population density of the attendance at a high school track and applied it to the entire surface of the world, then Earth would broadly be reclassified as uninhabited.”

This put a hush over the crowd.

One voice spoke up. “These people, these people that didn’t come, these crowds that stayed away in droves….did they have something there?”

The Old-Timer gave that some thought. “You know, you raise an interesting point that I haven’t considered. I was so wrapped up in the data side that I couldn’t see the human element.”

He thought for a moment.

“I do not seek to denigrate the noble sport of track and field, whereby people do on purpose – running over fences and what not – things which ordinary human being go out of their way to avoid. But yes, yes, to sit down to an entire track meet must have seemed to the viewer a bit like sitting down to watching the final few aeons of the end of the universe, when entropy finally catches up with us and all energy is eventually absorbed into the void till there is nothing but flatness anywhere to be seen.”

“I spoke to an elderly resident once,” said a young researcher, speaking up, “and he said that in those days of relatively early marriage a young couple could meet, court, fall in love, drift apart, drift back together, and get engaged and start planning the wedding, all before the first heats of the hundred yard dash really got underway. And that was the first event. Of course he gave me to understand that there were heats of heats of heats…of heats…and that a track meet that started at dawn may not really enter into the semi-quarter heats for the quarter-final heats right before the string of elimination heats until the moon shone down.”

All sat there, sipping, and musing upon what they had heard.

If they were of an imaginative frame of mind and if they had any human compassion whatsoever, their thoughts drifted to the chilliness of the concrete stands during the season that most generally hosts most track and field events, perhaps to wonder whether any crickets were there with their tiny chirps…or if they too had wandered off many generations before, looking for something more interesting to watch. Which wouldn’t be hard.

They thought of the runners on the track, and the field men on the turf, and pondered: now why exactly were they doing this, these young men? Tell me again? Didn’t they have lives and families and movies that they could have gone to see? Had beer not yet been invented? Was there something terribly wrong with them?

“Shakespeare speaks in one of his sonnets of a tree stripped by winter, its branches comparable to a bare ruined choir, where leaves can be counted as one, or few, or none,” said the Old-Timer, for as I have said, he was a thoughtful sort, given to somber considerations. “And the poet Shelly spoke of a ruined statue of a terrible ruler, now abandoned to the ages, and how the lone and level sands stretched far away.”

Another pause.

“But I am speaking of a place entirely devoid of humanity!” he stated flatly. And it is said by some who were there that his voice quavered a bit.

These were the types of thoughts that keep a soul up at night, dwelling on the vagaries and sometimes flat lunacy of the human endeavor.

And at the end, some conclusions are unknowable, are they not?

But, man, there was never anyone in the stands at any high school track meet that I was ever at. The Old-Timer has it exactly right. Devoid.